Some of the world’s first refugee camps and concentration camps appeared in the British Empire in the late 19th century. Famine camps detained emaciated refugees and billeted relief applicants on ...
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Some of the world’s first refugee camps and concentration camps appeared in the British Empire in the late 19th century. Famine camps detained emaciated refugees and billeted relief applicants on public works projects; plague camps segregated populations suspected of harboring disease and accommodated those evacuated from unsanitary locales; concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War, meanwhile, adapted a technology of colonial welfare in the context of war. Wartime camps in South Africa were simultaneously instruments of military violence and humanitarian care. While providing food and shelter to destitute refugees and disciplining and reforming a population cast as uncivilized and unhygienic, British officials in South Africa applied a developing set of imperial attitudes and approaches that also governed the development of plague and famine camps in India. More than the outcomes of military counterinsurgency, Boer War camps were registers of cultural discourses about civilization, class, gender, racial purity and sanitary pollution. Although British spokesmen regarded camps as hygienic enclaves, epidemic diseases decimated inmate populations creating a damaging political scandal. In order to curb mortality and introduce order, the British government mobilized a wide variety of disciplinary and sanitary lessons assembled at Indian plague and famine camps and at other kindred institutions like metropolitan workhouses. Authorities imported officials from India with experience managing plague and famine camps to systematize and rationalize South Africa’s wartime concentration camps. Ultimately, improvements to inmates’ health and well-being served to legitimize camps as technologies of liberal empire and biopolitical security.Less

Barbed-Wire Imperialism : Britain's Empire of Camps, 1876-1903

Aidan Forth

Published in print: 2017-10-17

Some of the world’s first refugee camps and concentration camps appeared in the British Empire in the late 19th century. Famine camps detained emaciated refugees and billeted relief applicants on public works projects; plague camps segregated populations suspected of harboring disease and accommodated those evacuated from unsanitary locales; concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War, meanwhile, adapted a technology of colonial welfare in the context of war. Wartime camps in South Africa were simultaneously instruments of military violence and humanitarian care. While providing food and shelter to destitute refugees and disciplining and reforming a population cast as uncivilized and unhygienic, British officials in South Africa applied a developing set of imperial attitudes and approaches that also governed the development of plague and famine camps in India. More than the outcomes of military counterinsurgency, Boer War camps were registers of cultural discourses about civilization, class, gender, racial purity and sanitary pollution. Although British spokesmen regarded camps as hygienic enclaves, epidemic diseases decimated inmate populations creating a damaging political scandal. In order to curb mortality and introduce order, the British government mobilized a wide variety of disciplinary and sanitary lessons assembled at Indian plague and famine camps and at other kindred institutions like metropolitan workhouses. Authorities imported officials from India with experience managing plague and famine camps to systematize and rationalize South Africa’s wartime concentration camps. Ultimately, improvements to inmates’ health and well-being served to legitimize camps as technologies of liberal empire and biopolitical security.

Big Sur embodies much of what has defined California since the mid-twentieth century. A remote, inaccessible, and undeveloped pastoral landscape until 1937, Big Sur quickly became a cultural symbol ...
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Big Sur embodies much of what has defined California since the mid-twentieth century. A remote, inaccessible, and undeveloped pastoral landscape until 1937, Big Sur quickly became a cultural symbol of California and the West—and a home to the ultra-wealthy. This transformation was due in part to writers and artists such as Robinson Jeffers and Ansel Adams, who created an enduring mystique for this coastline. But Big Sur’s prized coastline is also the product of the pioneering efforts of residents and Monterey County officials, who forged a collaborative public/private preservation model for Big Sur that foreshadowed the shape of California coastal preservation in the twenty-first century. Big Sur’s well-preserved vistas and high-end real estate situate this coastline somewhere between American ideals of development and wilderness. It is a space that challenges the way most Americans think of nature, its relationship to people, and what, in fact, makes it “wild.” This book highlights today’s complex and ambiguous intersections of class, the environment, and economic development through the lens of an iconic California landscape.Less

Big Sur : The Making of a Prized California Landscape

Shelley Alden Brooks

Published in print: 2017-10-24

Big Sur embodies much of what has defined California since the mid-twentieth century. A remote, inaccessible, and undeveloped pastoral landscape until 1937, Big Sur quickly became a cultural symbol of California and the West—and a home to the ultra-wealthy. This transformation was due in part to writers and artists such as Robinson Jeffers and Ansel Adams, who created an enduring mystique for this coastline. But Big Sur’s prized coastline is also the product of the pioneering efforts of residents and Monterey County officials, who forged a collaborative public/private preservation model for Big Sur that foreshadowed the shape of California coastal preservation in the twenty-first century. Big Sur’s well-preserved vistas and high-end real estate situate this coastline somewhere between American ideals of development and wilderness. It is a space that challenges the way most Americans think of nature, its relationship to people, and what, in fact, makes it “wild.” This book highlights today’s complex and ambiguous intersections of class, the environment, and economic development through the lens of an iconic California landscape.

There are moments when we forget how fortunate we are to have the California coast. The state is home to 1,100 miles of uninterrupted coastline defined by long stretches of beach and jagged rocky ...
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There are moments when we forget how fortunate we are to have the California coast. The state is home to 1,100 miles of uninterrupted coastline defined by long stretches of beach and jagged rocky cliffs. Coastal Sage chronicles the career and accomplishments of Peter Douglas, the longest-serving executive director of the California Coastal Commission. For nearly three decades, Douglas fought to keep the California coast public, prevent overdevelopment, and safeguard habitat. In doing so, Douglas emerged as a leading figure in the contemporary American environmental movement and influenced public conservation efforts across the country. He coauthored California’s foundational laws pertaining to shoreline management and conservation: Proposition 20 and the California Coastal Act. Many of the political battles to save the coast from overdevelopment and secure public access are revealed for the first time in this study of the leader who was at once a visionary, warrior, and coastal sage.Less

Coastal Sage : Peter Douglas and the Fight to Save California's Shore

Thomas J. Osborne

Published in print: 2017-11-10

There are moments when we forget how fortunate we are to have the California coast. The state is home to 1,100 miles of uninterrupted coastline defined by long stretches of beach and jagged rocky cliffs. Coastal Sage chronicles the career and accomplishments of Peter Douglas, the longest-serving executive director of the California Coastal Commission. For nearly three decades, Douglas fought to keep the California coast public, prevent overdevelopment, and safeguard habitat. In doing so, Douglas emerged as a leading figure in the contemporary American environmental movement and influenced public conservation efforts across the country. He coauthored California’s foundational laws pertaining to shoreline management and conservation: Proposition 20 and the California Coastal Act. Many of the political battles to save the coast from overdevelopment and secure public access are revealed for the first time in this study of the leader who was at once a visionary, warrior, and coastal sage.

The Palestinian national movement gestated in the early decades of the twentieth century, but it was born in the Great Revolt of 1936–39, a period of sustained Arab protest against British policy in ...
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The Palestinian national movement gestated in the early decades of the twentieth century, but it was born in the Great Revolt of 1936–39, a period of sustained Arab protest against British policy in Palestine. In this book, Matthew Kraig Kelly makes the novel case that the key to understanding the rebellion lies in the "crimino-national" domain—a hitherto neglected area of overlap between criminological and nationalist discourses, and the primary terrain upon which the war of 1936–39 was fought. As Kelly elaborates, apart from national autonomy, the Palestinian rebels’ primary objective was to repudiate the British framing of their national movement as a criminal enterprise. The rebels therefore appropriated the institutions and even the aesthetics that betokened London’s legal title to Palestine, donning rank-specific uniforms and erecting their own postal, prison, and justice systems. In thus establishing the rudiments of a state, Palestinians shifted the criminal mantle onto their opponents: the British and the Zionists. Crime, in this sense, was the central preoccupation of the Palestinian national project, as it likely was of other such projects on the fringe of empire. Kelly's analysis amounts to a new history of the rebellion, and it offers important lessons for studies of interwar nationalism and insurgency more broadly.Less

Crime of Nationalism : Britain, Palestine, and Nation-Building on the Fringe of Empire

Matthew Kraig Kelly

Published in print: 2017-10-03

The Palestinian national movement gestated in the early decades of the twentieth century, but it was born in the Great Revolt of 1936–39, a period of sustained Arab protest against British policy in Palestine. In this book, Matthew Kraig Kelly makes the novel case that the key to understanding the rebellion lies in the "crimino-national" domain—a hitherto neglected area of overlap between criminological and nationalist discourses, and the primary terrain upon which the war of 1936–39 was fought. As Kelly elaborates, apart from national autonomy, the Palestinian rebels’ primary objective was to repudiate the British framing of their national movement as a criminal enterprise. The rebels therefore appropriated the institutions and even the aesthetics that betokened London’s legal title to Palestine, donning rank-specific uniforms and erecting their own postal, prison, and justice systems. In thus establishing the rudiments of a state, Palestinians shifted the criminal mantle onto their opponents: the British and the Zionists. Crime, in this sense, was the central preoccupation of the Palestinian national project, as it likely was of other such projects on the fringe of empire. Kelly's analysis amounts to a new history of the rebellion, and it offers important lessons for studies of interwar nationalism and insurgency more broadly.

The objective of Destroying Yemen is to put South Arabia within a framework of analysis that permits new ways to explore the global transformations driven by “liberalism and market economics” during ...
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The objective of Destroying Yemen is to put South Arabia within a framework of analysis that permits new ways to explore the global transformations driven by “liberalism and market economics” during the 1900-2017 period. Of concern are the kinds of interactions between external parties, primarily driven by globalist doctrines seeking to extract the considerable surplus wealth produced in South Arabia. Crucially, the response from Yemen’s indigenous peoples appears to have global significance. Long self-sufficient and often themselves actively engaged in dynamic trans-regional relations that pre-date the ascendency of global capitalism, looking closely at how Yemenis confront and until now, resist globalist encroachments presents us an opportunity to reinterpret recent events in Yemen and the larger world since the Cold War. In particular, this book analyzes post-war Yemen through its close association with, among other things, a neo-liberal model of economic “development” that ultimately arrives in Yemen via various channels—Egypt’s invasion in 1962, Takfiri violence with Saudi support, and neoliberal “reforms” introduced by stealth over a period of 30 years. The fact that Yemen played an important role in shaping the trajectory of what were global visions for imposing Euro-American power throughout the Middle East, may prove invaluable to a broad range of scholars interested in studying the modern world from the perspective of indigenous agents.Less

Destroying Yemen : What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us about the World

Isa Blumi

Published in print: 2018-01-09

The objective of Destroying Yemen is to put South Arabia within a framework of analysis that permits new ways to explore the global transformations driven by “liberalism and market economics” during the 1900-2017 period. Of concern are the kinds of interactions between external parties, primarily driven by globalist doctrines seeking to extract the considerable surplus wealth produced in South Arabia. Crucially, the response from Yemen’s indigenous peoples appears to have global significance. Long self-sufficient and often themselves actively engaged in dynamic trans-regional relations that pre-date the ascendency of global capitalism, looking closely at how Yemenis confront and until now, resist globalist encroachments presents us an opportunity to reinterpret recent events in Yemen and the larger world since the Cold War. In particular, this book analyzes post-war Yemen through its close association with, among other things, a neo-liberal model of economic “development” that ultimately arrives in Yemen via various channels—Egypt’s invasion in 1962, Takfiri violence with Saudi support, and neoliberal “reforms” introduced by stealth over a period of 30 years. The fact that Yemen played an important role in shaping the trajectory of what were global visions for imposing Euro-American power throughout the Middle East, may prove invaluable to a broad range of scholars interested in studying the modern world from the perspective of indigenous agents.

Flavors of Empire examines the rise of Thai food and the way it shaped the racial and ethnic contours of Thai American identity and community. Mark Padoongpatt makes use of original archival research ...
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Flavors of Empire examines the rise of Thai food and the way it shaped the racial and ethnic contours of Thai American identity and community. Mark Padoongpatt makes use of original archival research and rich oral histories to explore the factors that made foodways central to the Thai American experience. Starting with the U.S. Cold War intervention in Thailand, he traces how the informal U.S. empire allowed Americans to discover Thai food and introduce it to adventurous eaters back home. When Thais arrived in Los Angeles, they reinvented and repackaged Thai cuisine in various ways to meet its rising popularity in urban and suburban spaces. America's fascination with Thai cuisine resulted in Thais having to remake themselves over the second half of the twentieth century in relation to the perceived exoticness and sensuousness of Thai food. Padoongpatt argues that this remaking produced "Thai Americans"—not a cultural identity rooted in ethnic difference but a social and political relationship defined by U.S. empire, liberal multiculturalism, and racial geography of Los Angeles. He also contends that while food brought Thais together, provided a sense of pride and visibility, and allowed Thai Americans to lay claims to their place in the city, it also led to divisions within the community and created barriers to collective mobilization for social justice. Padoongpatt deftly handles the history, politics, and tastes of Thai food, all while demonstrating the way racial projects emerge in seemingly mundane and unexpected places in an era of multiculturalism.Less

Flavors of Empire : Food and the Making of Thai America

Mark Padoongpatt

Published in print: 2017-09-19

Flavors of Empire examines the rise of Thai food and the way it shaped the racial and ethnic contours of Thai American identity and community. Mark Padoongpatt makes use of original archival research and rich oral histories to explore the factors that made foodways central to the Thai American experience. Starting with the U.S. Cold War intervention in Thailand, he traces how the informal U.S. empire allowed Americans to discover Thai food and introduce it to adventurous eaters back home. When Thais arrived in Los Angeles, they reinvented and repackaged Thai cuisine in various ways to meet its rising popularity in urban and suburban spaces. America's fascination with Thai cuisine resulted in Thais having to remake themselves over the second half of the twentieth century in relation to the perceived exoticness and sensuousness of Thai food. Padoongpatt argues that this remaking produced "Thai Americans"—not a cultural identity rooted in ethnic difference but a social and political relationship defined by U.S. empire, liberal multiculturalism, and racial geography of Los Angeles. He also contends that while food brought Thais together, provided a sense of pride and visibility, and allowed Thai Americans to lay claims to their place in the city, it also led to divisions within the community and created barriers to collective mobilization for social justice. Padoongpatt deftly handles the history, politics, and tastes of Thai food, all while demonstrating the way racial projects emerge in seemingly mundane and unexpected places in an era of multiculturalism.

Starting in the late nineteenth century, scholars and activists all over the world suddenly began to insist that understandings of sex be based on science. As Japanese and Indian sexologists ...
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Starting in the late nineteenth century, scholars and activists all over the world suddenly began to insist that understandings of sex be based on science. As Japanese and Indian sexologists influenced their German, British, and American counterparts and vice versa, sexuality, modernity, and imaginings of exotified “Others” became intimately linked. The first anthology to provide a worldwide perspective on the birth and development of the field, this book contends that actors outside of Europe—in Asia, Latin America, and Africa—became important interlocutors in debates on prostitution, birth control, and transvestism. Ideas circulated through intellectual exchange, travel, and internationally produced and disseminated publications. This book tackles specific issues, including the female orgasm and the criminalization of male homosexuality, to demonstrate how concepts and ideas introduced by sexual scientists gained currency throughout the modern world.Less

Global History of Sexual Science, 1880-1960

Published in print: 2017-11-07

Starting in the late nineteenth century, scholars and activists all over the world suddenly began to insist that understandings of sex be based on science. As Japanese and Indian sexologists influenced their German, British, and American counterparts and vice versa, sexuality, modernity, and imaginings of exotified “Others” became intimately linked. The first anthology to provide a worldwide perspective on the birth and development of the field, this book contends that actors outside of Europe—in Asia, Latin America, and Africa—became important interlocutors in debates on prostitution, birth control, and transvestism. Ideas circulated through intellectual exchange, travel, and internationally produced and disseminated publications. This book tackles specific issues, including the female orgasm and the criminalization of male homosexuality, to demonstrate how concepts and ideas introduced by sexual scientists gained currency throughout the modern world.

This rich history of Palestine in the last decade of the Ottoman Empire reveals the nation emerging as a cultural entity engaged in a vibrant intellectual, political, and social exchange of ideas and ...
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This rich history of Palestine in the last decade of the Ottoman Empire reveals the nation emerging as a cultural entity engaged in a vibrant intellectual, political, and social exchange of ideas and initiatives. Employing nuanced ethnography, rare autobiographies, and unpublished maps and photos, this book discerns a self-consciously modern and secular Palestinian public sphere. New urban sensibilities, schools, monuments, public parks, railways, and roads catalyzed by the Great War and described in detail by the author show a world that challenges the politically driven denial of the existence of Palestine as a geographic, cultural, political, and economic space.Less

Great War and the Remaking of Palestine

Salim Tamari

Published in print: 2017-08-15

This rich history of Palestine in the last decade of the Ottoman Empire reveals the nation emerging as a cultural entity engaged in a vibrant intellectual, political, and social exchange of ideas and initiatives. Employing nuanced ethnography, rare autobiographies, and unpublished maps and photos, this book discerns a self-consciously modern and secular Palestinian public sphere. New urban sensibilities, schools, monuments, public parks, railways, and roads catalyzed by the Great War and described in detail by the author show a world that challenges the politically driven denial of the existence of Palestine as a geographic, cultural, political, and economic space.

This book explores the life-worlds sustained through letter correspondence within the evolution of racism and mass incarceration in California history. Across three cases, this investigation uncovers ...
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This book explores the life-worlds sustained through letter correspondence within the evolution of racism and mass incarceration in California history. Across three cases, this investigation uncovers how letter correspondence facilitates a form of communal life for groups targeted for racialized confinement in different phases of development in the U.S. West: “Detained” focuses on migrants from Southern China during peak years of U.S. Chinese Exclusion; “Interned” focuses on families of Japanese ancestry during the WWII period; and “Imprisoned” focuses on socialities of Blackness in the post-Civil Rights era. This study clarifies how mass incarceration functions as a process of systematic social dismantling, situating research on letters within global capitalist movements, multiple racial logics, and overlapping modes of social control that have taken distinctive form in California. Framing letters within this political violence that qualifies them, this book examines how the structural, physical, ideological, and affective labor internalized in the letter creates alternative conditions to reinvent people’s own ways of life: a “poetics” or art of becoming, mediated in and through the letter and the interaction of literature with history, that prioritizes the dynamics of creative essence to generate an other kind of social power bound to the unfathomable.Less

Life of Paper : Letters and a Poetics of Living Beyond Captivity

Sharon Luk

Published in print: 2017-11-10

This book explores the life-worlds sustained through letter correspondence within the evolution of racism and mass incarceration in California history. Across three cases, this investigation uncovers how letter correspondence facilitates a form of communal life for groups targeted for racialized confinement in different phases of development in the U.S. West: “Detained” focuses on migrants from Southern China during peak years of U.S. Chinese Exclusion; “Interned” focuses on families of Japanese ancestry during the WWII period; and “Imprisoned” focuses on socialities of Blackness in the post-Civil Rights era. This study clarifies how mass incarceration functions as a process of systematic social dismantling, situating research on letters within global capitalist movements, multiple racial logics, and overlapping modes of social control that have taken distinctive form in California. Framing letters within this political violence that qualifies them, this book examines how the structural, physical, ideological, and affective labor internalized in the letter creates alternative conditions to reinvent people’s own ways of life: a “poetics” or art of becoming, mediated in and through the letter and the interaction of literature with history, that prioritizes the dynamics of creative essence to generate an other kind of social power bound to the unfathomable.

Sanitized Sex analyzes the development of new forms of regulation concerning prostitution, venereal disease, and intimacy during the occupation of Japan after the Second World War, focusing on the ...
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Sanitized Sex analyzes the development of new forms of regulation concerning prostitution, venereal disease, and intimacy during the occupation of Japan after the Second World War, focusing on the period between 1945 and 1952. It contributes to the cultural and social history of the occupation of Japan by investigating the intersections of the ordering principles of race, class, gender, and sexuality. It reveals how sex and its regulation were not marginal but key issues in the occupation politics, as well as in postwar state- and empire-building, U.S.-Japan relations, and American and Japanese self-imagery. An analysis of the “sanitization of sex” uncovers new spatial formations in the postwar period. The ways and means in which the sexual encounter between occupiers and occupied was regulated and experienced were closely linked to the disintegration of the Japanese Empire and the rise of U.S. hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region during the Cold War era. An analysis of the sanitization of sex thus sheds new light on the configuration of postwar Japan, the process of decolonization, the postcolonial formation of the Asia-Pacific region, and the particularities of postwar U.S. imperialism. More than a book about the regulation of sex between occupiers and occupied in postwar Japan, Sanitized Sex offers a reading of the intimacies of empires—defeated and victorious.Less

Robert Kramm

Published in print: 2017-09-26

Sanitized Sex analyzes the development of new forms of regulation concerning prostitution, venereal disease, and intimacy during the occupation of Japan after the Second World War, focusing on the period between 1945 and 1952. It contributes to the cultural and social history of the occupation of Japan by investigating the intersections of the ordering principles of race, class, gender, and sexuality. It reveals how sex and its regulation were not marginal but key issues in the occupation politics, as well as in postwar state- and empire-building, U.S.-Japan relations, and American and Japanese self-imagery. An analysis of the “sanitization of sex” uncovers new spatial formations in the postwar period. The ways and means in which the sexual encounter between occupiers and occupied was regulated and experienced were closely linked to the disintegration of the Japanese Empire and the rise of U.S. hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region during the Cold War era. An analysis of the sanitization of sex thus sheds new light on the configuration of postwar Japan, the process of decolonization, the postcolonial formation of the Asia-Pacific region, and the particularities of postwar U.S. imperialism. More than a book about the regulation of sex between occupiers and occupied in postwar Japan, Sanitized Sex offers a reading of the intimacies of empires—defeated and victorious.